stray cat strut.

The first poster that I noticed was the Stray Cats. I thought this was a great choice. Deciding to put up an 80s poster is easy, but deciding which band is tricky. You want something that most people will recognize, but you don't want to go with the too cheesy choices. You want people to see the poster and go, hey! The Stray Cats! I haven't thought of them in years! You don't want them to go, hey, look, another Thriller poster.

I looked more closely at the poster, because I have a special place in my heart for the Stray Cats for a reason that has nothing to do with music. In the 1980s, cats were pretty much all I ever thought about. Some little girls liked ponies, and some liked Barbies, and I liked those things, too. But really, it was all about felines. The Stray Cats first gained my love simply by calling themselves cats. And then once I heard the song "Stray Cat Strut," well, I gave them my heart to keep in a jar under their little cat beds.

Closer inspection revealed that the poster was signed. Then I noticed all the other posters in the bar. The bands were sort of all over the map, but each picture was marred by scrawling Sharpie marks. My first thought was that the bar owner must have an eBay account. I mean, this was just a little bar in Virginia Beach. How exactly did they get the Stray Cats? Not to mention Urge Overkill, Ben Folds Five, and Nine Inch Nails. Sure, those guys all probably started out in little bars all over the country, but it seemed unlikely that they all came to this one.

Then I realized that the autographs were made out to the bar. I guess the bar owner has an eBay account and a Sharpie. Well, okay, maybe all those bands had played here. But something still wasn't right. The only way the owner would know to hang those specific posters is if the bands had already hit it big. So either he had the bands sign their names before they were famous or the musicians sent them after making the big time.

I imagined a giant filing cabinet full of posters, the posters of every band who ever played at that bar in the last forty years. Every week, when the new Billboard top forty list came out (does anyone still look at that? is Billboard still around to make such lists?), the owner would look and see if any new bands had broken in. Then he would check his filing cabinet, which was very well-organized, by the way, and see if any of the newly-famous had ever played in his little bar. If so, then off to Wal-Mart to buy a new frame. Maybe he'd have to take someone else down from the wall to make room. Goodbye, Emerson Lake & Palmer, the Stray Cats are the new hot band.

That scenario seemed unlikely at best. Plus, I didn't like to think of the implications of the filing cabinet theory when Josh and his bandmates had not been asked for their John Hancocks. So maybe even famous rock stars remember the small town clubs and bars that helped them along the way. Perhaps the bar owner was a prodigious letter writer, who wrote to bands and demanded that they remember the little people. He could probably write to anyone and claim that they played there once; who remembers every pizza place/bar that they played at in years of touring?

I studied the Nine Inch Nails poster with particular interest. Like the Stray Cats, this band holds an odd sort of sway with me. I never owned one of their albums, and their songs were fine, but when I was in middle school, I had a crush on a boy with burgundy hair who was really into them. I never talked to this boy, it was more of a silent long-distance pining than a crush, and so any information I could glean about him, from stickers on his backpack to designs on his t-shirts, was added to my knowledge bank of longing. And then the boy I dated for eight years or so had a minor obsession with the band, too, and so I began to wonder if liking Nine Inch Nails was part of "my type," like being thin and a musician. The music is dark, and the man behind it is mysterious. Even his name, Trent Reznor, has a certain spookiness about it. Who really trusts the letter 'Z' anyway?

This particular poster was from an early era, back when I had a crush on a burgundy-haired kid on the boys' basketball team. Underneath the signature was a parenthetical statement, "(Isn't this poster really f**king gay?)".

Folks, I cannot begin to tell you how happy those words made me. They made me realize that Trent Reznor is, or at least was, self-conscious about his posters. Most likely, the record company designed them and he hated them. He just wanted to make sure that everyone, even small town bar owners, knew that he did not pick out that poster. In fact, he thinks it's totally gay. Also, Trent Reznor calls things "gay," just like middle school boys (and high school boys and college boys and, okay, girls, too). Next time I hear anyone speaking in reverent tones about Nine Inch Nails, I will snicker inside. And probably a little bit outside, too.

The mystery is gone. Trent Reznor can be spooky if he wants. I know the truth. Now if I could just find out some secret about the Stray Cats, I'll be set.